Amazon Work Conditions

by Editor
August 16, 2015 at 9:47 pm

https://www.smartertimes.com/1439/amazon-work-conditions

The New York Times has a long article about the "bruising workplace" of Amazon.com. It claims in a headline, "the company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions."

An Amazon executive, Nick Ciubotariu, has a LinkedIn post rebutting the Times article and explaining problems and inaccuracies with it.

A professor of journalism at the City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis, who is an Amazon shareholder, has a post complaining that the Times article "lacks two key attributes: context and — I can't quite believe I'm saying this — balance."

A few other points are worth mentioning. First, it's hard not to see the Times article as akin to its alarmist coverage of Rupert Mudoch when Mr. Murdoch was trying to buy the Wall Street Journal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and is an investor in Business Insider, and the Times seems to take a special pleasure in targeting owners of rival news organizations. If the Times reporters were just interested in how a corporate culture of data-based, challenging radical skepticism drives success, they could have written a piece on Raymond Dalio's Bridgewater Associates. Instead they chose to write about Mr. Bezos's Amazon.

Second, while the pieces by Mr. Ciubotario and Mr. Jarvis have gotten some attention around the web, less attention has been paid to an interview that Mr. Bezos gave the Telegraph. It appeared the same day as the Times article, which did not include a Bezos interview. The Telegraph article begins with a portrayal of Mr. Bezos going to the movies on the weekend with his children (a subtle rebuttal of the claim in the Times article that Amazon is somehow a family-unfriendly workplace). The Telegraph article concludes with Mr. Bezos saying, "Almost all the people I work with on a daily basis, are paid volunteers – at this point I've been working with them for more than a decade, and they can do whatever they want, they could be sipping margaritas on a beach, but they're here. Paid volunteers are the best people to work with as they're here for the right reasons."

That concept of "volunteer" gets right to the policy nub of the Amazon article. No one is forcing anyone to work there. Doubtless some will respond to the Times article with demands for additional regulations — overtime or caps on weekly hours for white-collar workers, additional family or medical leave. But as the facts in both the Times article and the LinkedIn post suggest, to some degree the labor market is self-regulating. For prospective employees, there's no lack of transparency about the work conditions. If Amazon is really such a terrible place to work, it will have trouble finding and retaining high-quality workers, and its reputation with customers might even suffer.

The usual disclosures apply when I write about Amazon: I'm a book author so the company affects me. This site and its sister site FutureOfCapitalism.com are Amazon affiliates, deriving revenue when someone clicks on a link to Amazon and buys something. I don't own stock in Amazon but do own stock in at least one competing retailer. I am a member of the Amazon Vine program that sends me items in exchange for writing reviews on Amazon. I shop at Amazon sometimes. In this case I should also disclose, too, that I know both of the authors of the Times article.

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